News

A global event now entering its 6th year, Open Access Week aims to support and promote Open Access within the academic sector.

It highlights the potential benefits of Open Access and Open Data, particularly as an important method of supporting and stimulating the knowledge economy.

The UK Data Service is involved in the movement toward Open Access in the data environment, providing a number of datasets without registration or authentication and plans to make more of its open licence data available as Open Access in the future.

Data currently available at the UK Data Service without registration or authentication include:

World Banks World Development Indicators, Global Development Finance, Africa Development Indicators openly available to all at UKDS.Stat

In support of Open Access Week, the UK Data Service is adding an open access area to its website, intended to draw attention to data that is available to anyone without restriction.

"We are committed to engaging with the Open Data agenda, and to providing data under access conditions commensurate with their confidentiality and sensitivity," says Melanie Wright, Associate Director for Access and Ingest at the UK Data Service. "Toward that end, we are continuously working with data owners to find ways to most effectively share data as freely and openly as possible."